


Casual Divinity

by orphan_account



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Gen, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:24:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/629822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It began how one might imagine things of this nature typically begin: with a Grigori who felt a little bit pokey. [the angel!au]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Casual Divinity

**Author's Note:**

> The author would like it to be known that as a lazy agnostic, their knowledge of angels and whatnot come primarily from _Dogma_ and the short story _Murder Mysteries_. Furthermore, the author would like it to be known that as a lazy American, their knowledge of nondescript UK culture is nonexistent and the portrayal of said culture in the following piece may be somewhat off.
> 
> To say the least.

When the first Grigori lost his first clump of feathers, everyone just assumed he was molting. Angels didn’t typically molt, of course, but those Grigoris always had been a bit eccentric.  
  
But when the disease, and it most certainly was a disease in the most human sense of the word (coughing, wheezing, the whole nine yards), proved to be quite transmittable, they all stopped poking fun at the patchy bastards. The divine decree to take refuge in an uninfected plane goes out to all uninfected personnel not long after the Archangel Michael is caught sneezing.  
  
Some wander over to one of the vast number of astral planes available for loitering, taking the time off as an opportunity to guide a few stranded souls to the afterlife. (Said souls weren’t necessary pleased to see the afterlife in this rather sickly state, but they didn’t have much of a say in the whole guiding-towards-light process.) A few shacked up with their illicit demon lovers (mostly Cherubim, those whores) in Hell, where everyone is constantly diseased but at least not contagious.  
  
The last handful with nowhere to go tuck their wings in and dive into humanity.  
  


* * *

_Casual Divinity_  
the angel!au  
jack, eugene, and company

* * *

  
Eugene has a metaphysical grabbag of reasons to not be Simon’s wingman. Simon is lecherous at best, has a tendency to make off in their ride home with companions who were not the proper owners of said ride (namely: Eugene), and tends to frequent clubs popular with personalities such as Bret Easton Ellis and Lindsay Lohan. And, on one occasion which Eugene thinks about only when he needs to win arguments, Snooki.  
  
Furthermore, Simon doesn’t need a wingman in the traditional sense. His wingmen pay for drinks and take the bus home at three in the morning after finding himself stranded at the third or fourth bar they’ve migrated to in one night.  
  
“No,” Eugene, therefore, says before Simon even asks.  
  
This, of course, does nothing to stop Simon from waving to him from across the bar he’d snuck off to get a Thursday night drink at (in favor of dealing with a passive aggressive, badly timed Christmas sweater from his Jewish mother that just arrived by private courier).  
  
“I didn’t follow you here,” Simon says (though Eugene suspects _lies_ would be more appropriate for this particular situation) before Eugene can ask.  
  
“ _No hablo inglés_ ,” Eugene says as the bartender approaches. Then, “Gin and tonic. Thanks.”  
  
Simon invites himself into the open seat (judging by the indignant squawk that comes behind him, it wasn’t open in the strictest sense of the word) to his right. “ _Mentiroso, mentiroso, cara de oso_.”  
  
Eugene admits he might have walked right into that one, with that one being Simon’s legendary gap year in Argentina. “Alright, I concede.”  
  
Naturally, Simon is nowhere near finished. He turns (easily, the guy he’d so rudely sat on having fled when they were still on English) to his neighbor on the right, a twenty-something chewing on a straw, to say, “ _¿Te dolió cuando te caiste del cielo?_ ”  
  
“ _Sí, poco_.” He looks up abruptly with the straw still caught between his teeth. “Hang on, I thought they spoke English here?”  
  
Partially to commend the kid on such a flawlessly deadpan sass-back to Simon’s latest favorite pickup line, and partially to prove to Simon that he is the worst wingman who should never be given wingman duties again, Eugene leans over to say, “Please excuse him, he’s got a peculiarly nasty case of Tourette’s for horniness.”  
  
“I’m a hor _net_ , if you will,” Simon says without missing a beat.  
  
“Oh, that’s quite alright,” the straw-chewer says as he returns his straw to his glass of what looked to be club soda. “I understand. Some of my best friends have just caught a hyper-divine strain of the avian influenza.”  
  
Simon falls rather gracelessly from his chair. Eugene might have laughed had he not leaned in closer to say, “A hyper- _what_?”  
  
“Divine.”  
  
That clarifies absolutely nothing. Eugene reassesses the contents of that glass with the chewed-up straw. “What are you drinking?”  
  
“Fizzy water,” is the immediate response. “You can buy me another.”  
  
Eugene, for lack of a better comeback, does.  
  
  
  
After five fizzy sodas and a second gin and tonic, Eugene loses track of Simon completely and finds his own keys pickpocketed from his coat. While his dead sober drinking mate (who, from what Eugene could piece together, seemed to be intent and content on spending the entire night performing a very elaborate and very literal response to Simon’s _did it hurt_ come-on) blew bubbles what remained of his drink, Eugene called a cab. He doesn’t realize he’s invited the strange little thing to follow him outside until said strange little thing had done exactly that.  
  
“Listen--is there someone I can call for you, uh, sir?”  
  
Sir shakes his head. “Jack. Jack Holden.”  
  
Jack smiles. “Seraph.”  
  
Eugene is about to say _excuse me?_ or _what?_ or some combination thereof, which made up the bulk of his contribution to the conversation of the night, but the words turn into a sort of sound effect not unlike, “ _Buh_?” when Jack drops his coat (which although unreasonably heavy for the summer, had been one of the less conspicuous things about the guy) and stretches out a pair of big, white wings.  
  
“It’s funny, you know. I thought this was going to be a problem,” Jack says conversationally as he flutters. _Flutters_. “I’m so out of touch with current events that I didn’t even know you guys had found out about us down here. I thought I was going to have to _hide_ these boys. Isn’t that funny?”  
  
His wings keep fluttering as his laughs. A group leaving the club rub at their eyes and gape as they pass. Eugene holds up a hand.  
  
“Just a minute,” he says.  
  
“Oh, sure,” Jack says.  
  
Eugene takes two steps back. Then he takes another ten to round the corner. Finally, he calls Simon. “You spiked my drink.”  
  
“Listen, sweetheart, I assure you that whatever went down between us was consensual and no drinks were--.” A pause. “Eugene?”  
  
Eugene thunks his head against the wall next to him. “Simon, do you believe in God?”  
  
A longer pause. “You just drunk-dialed me. _You_. Drunk-dialed _me_. This is such a sweet reversal that there _must_ be a God. Don’t go anywhere, I’m getting a tape recorder to save this for posterity.”  
  
Eugene hangs up.  
  
Jack has not disappeared when he returns to the front of the club, where his cab is honking impatiently. More importantly, the wings haven’t disappeared.  
  
And perhaps most importantly, Jack’s shirt _has_. The shirtless, winged wonder waves at him, points to the cab, and gets in. (Eugene assumes he had the decency to tuck in his wings, because no screams come from the human, driver’s side of the cab.)  
  
Though it hadn’t seemed to help that group from earlier much at all, Eugene tries rubbing at his eyes. He tries closing them and counting to ten before opening them again, but when he gets into the cab just before it pulls away, Jack is still there.  
  
And Jack is still grinning.  
  
“Cosmic joke,” Eugene decides out loud.  
  
“The taxi system is no joke, Eugene. It’s practically sanctioned.”  
  
“Sanctioned,” Eugene says. “By God.”  
  
Jack nods.  
  
Eugene squeezes his eyes shut and balls his hands into fists at his sides. He isn’t entirely sure how his alcohol tolerance dropped into the two-drinks-equals-drunk zone, but that must be what’s happened here. Alternatively, he guesses, almost hopefully, “You’re having me on.”  
  
“Oh, _no_ ,” Jack says. “I was transferred from the Having Persons On department in the early seventeenth century. I work in Music now.”  
  
“Music.” Eugene feels a massive headache coming on. In fact, it might be a migraine. It might even be the mother of all migraines. “So--the Stones. the Smiths. One Direction.”  
  
“Oh, _no_ ,” Jack says again, sounding even more scandalized than before. “Credit where credit’s due. That was all, you know--.”  
  
Eugene opens his eyes in time to see Jack looking pointedly down at their feet. Or, rather, to some Biblical spot far, far underneath their feet. “Right. So you--.”  
  
“My last project of Enya,” Jack says. “We’re kind of between projects now. They’re downsizing the department.”  
  
Eugene drops his head back and stares up. Then, very slowly, “Uh- _huh_. That’s very--where in the hell did you get those wings?”  
  
He just barely keeps himself from adding, _but they look so real_.  
  
“These particular ones?” Jack looks behind himself as though he needs to make sure they’re still there and attached properly. Eugene relaxes properly, expecting to be told very imminently that they were a pair of really excellent props.  
  
Unfortunately, what Jack says is, “Just after the Battle of Stalingrad.”  
  
When no further explanation comes (and Eugene gives thanks for that, adding along the mental footnote that said thanks were certainly _not_ for God in this particular case), Eugene says in a voice so strained that it almost hurts, “So I was going to call someone for you?”  
  
“Right! Yes, please. Sam Yao.”  
  
Eugene takes out his cell and takes comfort in the fact that Jack Holden had somewhere to go. (For a second there, he almost thought the very strange man was going to follow him home.) “What’s his number?”  
  
“Something in the high millions. It isn’t nearly close enough to the end of his time to worry about that yet,” Jack says.  
  
Eugene grits his teeth. “Phone number?”  
  
Jack gives him such a perfectly blank look that Eugene quickly realizes the whole following-him-home scenario was probably, even imminently, about to occur.  
  
  
  
Eugene drinks a pot of coffee as soon as he gets home. It’s stale morning coffee that none of his roommates had bothered to pour out, but he barely tastes it going down. Then, feeling significantly more sober (despite not having felt particularly drunk in the first place), he gives Jack’s wings a good once-over.  
  
The feathers sit in neat little rows when Jack curls his wings in, the completely unnatural things lying so close to his back that they could indeed feasibly be hidden under a thick coat. When he stretches them out, Eugene can see the anatomically correct (as anatomically correct as any of this could _possibly_ be) bone structure and the exact place where wing becomes skin and spine.  
  
“Huh,” Eugene says. He gets woozy enough to sway a little, then so light-headed that he has to sit. From the couch, he sees the last detail to see the biologically improbable deal. “Okay. Okay, you don’t have a belly button.”  
  
“Well, you don’t have both your legs.” Jack smiles like he thinks he’s told a great joke, but the expression drops into something more akin to horror within a second. “Oh my _gosh_ , I am so sorry. That wasn’t funny at all, was it. You see why I was transferred out of Having Persons On?”  
  
Eugene is delirious enough to laugh a little. He gets up after putting some Lamaze breathing (a life skill he never thought he would have, but these things happen when one’s statistics TA gets stranded in Borneo and asks one to look after his very pregnant wife) into exercise and finds a clean shirt in his dresser to give to the absurd person (creature?) in his living room.  
  
Jack puts it on without much complaint, though not without any. He pulls a face. “How do you wear these things?”  
  
Eugene tries very hard not to think about what Jack _might_ be used to wearing or, well, not wearing. “So you’re a--so you’ve got wings.”  
  
Jack stops picking at the hem of the shirt and has the gall to look confused. “R- _ight_. Yes? You sound surprised.”  
  
“Of course I’m--.” Eugene takes a breather and carefully does not curse at a--an--. “You’re a fucking angel of the lord!”  
  
If carefulness were a virtue (which Jack would surely know, but Eugene wasn’t about to ask), Eugene would never claim to possess it in any great quantity.  
  
“Just a _Seraph_. Nothing to get excited over,” Jack says, more slowly now. “I mean, unless angels in general are news to you. Which can’t be true because--because--oh. _Oh_.”  
  
Eugene frowns and crosses his arms.  
  
“Your--your friend, from the watering hole. He did know about me, didn’t he? He wasn’t just delivering a rather trite pickup line, was he?”  
  
Eugene tightens his jaw so hard he thinks he might need a visit to the dentist after this all blew over. He shakes his head to the first question and nods to the second.  
  
Jack gasps and and flutters so suddenly it knocks a book off of the shelf behind him and lifts his feet just off the ground. “But no one actually _says_ that.”  
  
There has to be some sort of grand irony in Simon using a pickup line so preposterously bad that an angel outed himself in response. Eugene might even have been amused had he not been so tired.  
  
“Is this the Rapture, then?” Eugene asks, feeling rather obligated as the human being of the room.  
  
“Oh, no, that’s not for another--.” Jack stops. “Hey! Clever, but you can’t ask that.”  
  
 _And you can’t possibly exist_ , Eugene would very much like to say. Instead, he goes with, “So you’re just--what, then? Vacationing?”  
  
Jack settles down and takes a chair. Eugene’s chair. His very favorite armchair, which now had an _angel_ in it. (Eugene is starting to think he didn’t have too much to drink tonight, but rather, far too little.)  
  
“In a manner of speaking,” Jack says. “We’re all on mandatory leave while everything is quarantined up there. Are you _sure_ you didn’t know about angels?”  
  
Eugene doesn’t even begin to dignify that with an answer. “Right. This--holy bird flu.”  
  
“A hyper-divine strain of avian influenza,” Jack says. “Nasty business.”  
  
“Which causes--?”  
  
“Molting and moaning and such.” Jack pretends to gag, which is so human that Eugene regains a flicker of hope that this is all some sort of terrible joke. “It turns us into pretty good imitations of those zombie things you’ve got down here.”  
  
Eugene doesn’t mention that they don’t actually _have_ zombies down here in the non-fiction world because, well, he didn’t think they had angels, either. “Zombies. Right. With wings.”  
  
“Exactly! Zombies with wings.” Jack stops, frowns to himself. “Oh. That doesn’t sound very good, does it.”  
  
Eugene is pretty sure he has no problems getting on board with that. He nods. “And the bird--avian influenza got into heaven because--.”  
  
“Grigoris,” Jack says solemnly. “One of them was feeling a bit pokey.”  
  
“I’m sorry?” Eugene is fairly certain he heard him wrong. “Pokey?”  
  
Jack lifts a hand and mimes a motion that Eugene suspects is supposed to be _poking_. “Yeah, pokey. In the mood to poke. I heard, though this is just an office rumor, that this Grigori was watching some sort of biochemistry experiment and got a bit too close. Bumped into a petri dish of unsavory organisms and, well, here we are.”  
  
Eugene spends a minute trying to decide whether he’s more surprised by the fact that angels had offices or that they _gossiped_. In the end, he decides he’s most surprised by the fact that he’s no longer really, truly shocked by either of these little factoids.  
  
“And the-- _uninfected_ have come here?”  
  
“Here, there--.” Jack looks down again. “Wherever, really. So long as we keep our distance from those coughing, wheezing--.”  
  
This is of course when Jack coughs. He follows it with a little breath that Eugene wouldn’t hesitate to describe as a wheeze.  
  
  
  
Simon is so prone to swallowing things he shouldn’t (gum, fish bones, LEGO pieces from a set picked up at a yard sale for his non-existent baby cousin) that Eugene has the hospital on speed dial. He nearly hits dial when Jack, rolling about on his couch and moaning about dying, gives a panicked little shake of his wings that sends a feather floating over onto Eugene’s feet.  
  
He stops and thinks again. While Jack drinks tap water with a bendy straw from a measuring glass, Eugene pulls up a phone book and starts to look for a vet.  
  
“Will you throw me an open-casket funeral?” Jack says.  
  
Eugene goes back to the hospital number. He stares at it for a minute, then at the number of a rather reputable vet. Then, he stares at the sun that’s rising outside his window. He feels very much like he should know better than to expect things from Jack now, but he’s still caught off-guard by just how _melodramatic_ the guy could be. He didn’t expect anything from angels (or, in fact, _angels_ ), but he emphatically didn’t expect melodrama.  
  
He thinks he hears Jack crying.  
  
Ultimately, he redials Simon.  
  
“Doctor or vet,” Eugene says.  
  
Simon sounds out of breath and something that Eugene’s doesn’t want to think of as a bed creaks rhythmically. “Say again?”  
  
“I need to know if I should call a doctor or a veterinarian.”  
  
There’s a moment where Eugene thinks Simon might be a normal human being (who _doesn’t_ answer his cell phone during _sex_ ) and ask for context. He spends that moment trying and failing to formulate a response to the impending question, but it ends up being a moot point because the question never comes.  
  
Simon simply says, “Isn’t Maxine both?” and hangs up.  
  
Jack wails indecipherably into a cushion. Eugene calls Maxine.  
  
  
  
“I am not _both_ ,” Maxine says as soon as Eugene opens the door for her. “I performed a healing spell on a cockatrice _in character_. That doesn’t make me a vet, and you can tell Simon to shove that up his--.”  
  
Eugene steps to the side. Jack is still sniffling, but upright enough to wave.  
  
“--oh.”  
  
She turns to Eugene and very calmly pinches his arm with what must be all her strength. “Do you think this is _funny_ , Mr. Woods? I’m on call in two hours. I could be _sleeping_ , and you call me here for a _costume party_?”  
  
Eugene shakes his head and steps back further. (If he happens to step back towards a bottle of Advil, and if he happens to open said bottle and drop two pellets into his mouth, well, he felt it was a rather well-earned happenstance.)  
  
“There’s going to be a costume party?” Jack asks in a tone that suggests his worst problem of the moment is that he might miss this supposed costume party.  
  
Maxine frowns at him. (Eugene lets her, for a moment, because _someone_ should be frowning other than him.)  
  
“Pull up your shirt,” he says.  
  
Jack grumbles a little about dead men walking and politeness, but eventually does.  
  
“Where’s his belly button,” Maxine says instantly. She steps inside and looks closer, probably for signs of make-up or costuming. She, apparently, finds nothing, because she sounds significantly more alarmed when she says, “Where’s your belly button?”  
  
“He only has one leg!” Jack says, defensively, and points to Eugene with both his hands.  
  
Maxine stares for a good long minute before returning to Eugene, who hadn’t moved from the door and couldn’t honestly say he wasn’t contemplating an escape route.  
  
“Is he what I think he is?” Maxine asks, low and hushed.  
  
Eugene doesn’t have any idea what she might think he is and he says as much.  
  
“You know--.” Maxine looks over her shoulder at Jack and smiles almost nervously, or at least as nervously as she ever does anything (which is to say, not very). “An _extraterrestrial_?”  
  
“I think the politically correct term would be celestial,” Eugene says, so calmly that he surprises himself.  
  
Maxine, unamused, calls Paula.  
  
  
  
By breakfast, a veritable party has gathered in Eugene’s living room. Paula rushes over and brings her intern with her, an ex-CSI guy from New Canton who Eugene keeps catching trying to sneak pictures of Jack on his cell. (“But it’s for _Nadia_ ,” the guys says when Paula confiscates his phone. Paula does not care.)  
  
Simon turns up at some point to yawn and fry himself an egg before he even notices the congregation around the couch. He has a bit of yolk on his chin and rather viciously takes the napkin Eugene offers him as he shuffles over to react to the--well, _wings_.  
  
“Did you take _my_ guy home? You are the worst wingman _ever_.”  
  
Which--wasn’t exactly the reaction Eugene was expecting, but he takes it as a small victory as Simon disappears into his room to hibernate until the weekend.  
  
An unexpectedly polite girl Eugene doesn’t recognize is the next to arrive, bringing by the jacket Simon left at her place and a home-knitted scarf (as a sort of _thanks for the night_ gift, she explains). She’s far too sweet for Simon, but before Eugene can urge her to run, she spots Jack and gasps and joins the half-circle forming around the ailing angel.  
  
“He’s not actually ailing from anything,” Maxine says at some point when she breaks away from the group. “The cough was just a little tickle in his throat. It’s good of him to let us stick around, though. I have so many questions.”  
  
Eugene doesn’t know when the ability to decide who gets to stick around in _his_ apartment became something Jack possessed, but before he can make this very valid point, one of his co-workers (horoscopes, advice, and sometimes sports) comes barging in through the door Eugene feels he _really_ should get around to locking.  
  
“I hear you have an angel,” Alice says.  
  
Eugene blinks. “Please tell me it’s not on the news.”  
  
“Don’t be silly,” Alice says as she moves to join Jack’s booming fanclub. “Jody called me.”  
  
Jody, Eugene decides, may not be as sweet as he thought.  
  
For the most part, everyone who arrives uninvited begins to believe in angels with far less resistance than Eugene. (Paula did, admittedly, exhibit a reasonable amount of skepticism until Jack’s wings didn’t come off when she surreptitiously tugged on one.) Maxine keeps checking his vitals like she expects him to expire without warning and Paula asks him pointed questions about bone structure, airspeed velocity and _heaven_ (though always in air quotes). Jody makes a date with him for a Renaissance fair in two weeks. (“Oh, the Renaissance was _lovely_ ,” Jack says. “Have you been?”)  
  
Alice brings Eugene a cup of coffee sometime around lunch, but switches it out for the hot chocolate in her other hand when she seems to spot him twitching a bit erratically.  
  
“Going to call your dad?” she asks as she takes a seat on the floor next to him. (Eugene _had_ reclaimed his armchair some time ago, but he was ejected from it when Paula needed a place to set up some sort of high-tech equipment that Eugene didn’t have the clearance to even know the name of.)  
  
Eugene takes the cup and picks out the marshmallows. “Why would I call my dad?”  
  
“Well, I don’t know. It was your birthday not long ago, and you’ve got an angel on your couch.” She holds her cup out for the marshmallows. “Isn’t he going through a crisis of faith?”  
  
“The entire institution of Catholicism is going through a crisis of faith,” he says. “My father is having a midlife crisis. People go through middle age all the time without needing to meet an angel.”  
  
Alice pats him on the shoulder as though pitying the degrading quality of logic in his arguments. “Give your dad a call, Eugene.”  
  
Eugene scalds his tongue on the hot chocolate, perhaps a little bit out of spite. In hindsight, it wasn’t his brightest idea.  
  
  
  
At some point, he sleeps. Or, at least, he thinks he must because at the end of a blink, Eugene opens his eyes to find his unsolicited guests gone and himself on the couch. Jack is perched next to him and across the coffee table, sipping tea on the loveseat, are his parents.  
  
“Did I call them,” Eugene says under his breath. In his periphery, he sees Jack nod. He wonders if angels can lie, spends a moment hoping they can, and finally resigns himself to straightening his posture. “Mom. Dad. Thanks for coming.”  
  
They talk in stilted, awkward sentences for the first ten minutes, then in slightly shaky tones for the next twenty. There’s a brief bout of shouting that Eugene doesn’t remember the start of, the end of, or even the contents of. They cover everything from work to relationships to the Christmas sweater Eugene isn’t wearing, and they don’t even begin to touch on the subject of the little tufts of white that peeks out from behind Jack every time he shifts.  
  
There’s an substantial silence while Eugene’s mother goes to reorganize his fridge and to make something out of the withering vegetables in there, only broken when Simon comes stumbling out of his room to introduce Jack to the Wii. (“Oh, I’ve _heard_ about this,” Jack says as he bowls his third strike.)  
  
At an ambiguously, and deceptively, calm hour of the afternoon, a tentative knock comes on the door. Eugene doesn’t move immediately.  
  
“Um, hello?” The voice is hesitant and, more importantly, unfamiliar. Eugene decides he doesn’t want to deal with any more strangers in his house today. “It’s Sam Yao?”  
  
Because of course it would be Sam Yao, whoever the _hell_ that is.  
  
Eugene looks up when his father stands while Simon opens the door. Jack, again with all that gall, looks even excited. With a sigh and no resistance left in his bones, Eugene asks, “Who’s Sam Yao?”  
  
“The new pastor at your parish, dear,” his mother says as she returns with as much food as she can carry with two hands and arms.  
  
Eugene is half-tempted to mention that agnostics don’t have parishes, but agnosticism became outdated twelve hours ago. He doesn’t say anything at all.  
  
“Sam!” Jack says, arms and wings spread wide. The awkwardness with which he’d sat next to Eugene melts away completely at the sight of an apparently familiar face.  
  
The last of Eugene’s inquisitiveness also flees his body and he asks, with no hint of it being a question whatsoever, “You two know each other.”  
  
“I was his sister’s guardian angel for a while, when I was _experimenting_ back in the early millennia,” Jack says. He tucks his wings in, quickly, when he notices Eugene’s parents (and this Father Yao character, too, for that matter) staring. “We’ve never met, properly, but I thought I’d stay with him.”  
  
The young pastor looks so nervous that Eugene finds the energy somewhere to feel sorry for him. “He thought he’d stay with you.”  
  
Sam laughs, sounding every bit as nervous as he looks. “I guess he’s staying with me! Brilliant!”  
  
Jack laughs, too, and hugs Eugene’s mother goodbye. He also tells Eugene’s father to keep working on that pre-swing out on the green. Then, he stops in front of Eugene.  
  
“Well,” he says, with this little twinkle in his eyes and voice that almost sounds like _fanfare_. “Thank you, ‘gene.”  
  
Eugene nods. While he’s trying to figure out what he could possibly say to that, Jack starts to take his shirt off and, very suddenly, it becomes clear that the right thing to say then, and very quickly, would be, “Uh, no. Keep the shirt. It’s the least I could do.”  
  
He could swear he hears Sam breathe out a sigh of relief at not having to walk down the street with a shirtless person of questionable genealogy.  
  
He could also swear, that before Jack breezes on by to the door, he kisses him on the cheek. Perhaps as angels are prone to do.  
  
Naturally.  
  
  
  
It takes Eugene three days to get his parents out of town. His mother stops sending him passive aggressive gifts for holidays that aren’t in season and he hears his father has starting going to church again. Eugene does his level best to not over-analyze these occurrences, or in fact analyze them at all.  
  
It’s another three weeks before he stops finding feathers all over his clothes and furniture.  
  
  
  
Eugene routinely gives himself a pat on the back for _not_ becoming an alcoholic, which wouldn’t have been a very severe transformation for a man faced with an angel to make. He goes to a bar once a week now, instead of the once-a-month trips Simon managed to trick him into, but he never drinks alone and he has a five-drink limit.  
  
Which sounds questionably habit-forming until he admits to himself his drinks have been, almost exclusively, fizzy waters.  
  
He doesn’t hear anything about angels on the news in the months following the appearance of Jack Holden, but he does read about a Professor Van Ark, arrested for very illegal and very dangerous tamperings with some samples of the avian influenza. There didn’t seem to be anything divine about it, of course, and Eugene even began to think that perhaps he imagined the whole thing.  
  
Then Simon fires up the Wii, and a very improbably high score of 300 in bowling under Jack’s name brings the sobering clarity of it all back in one fell swoop.  
  
The voice belonging to the being (the _celestial_ being) he is most assuredly not thinking about as he chews on a black cocktail straw says, “Did it hurt?”  
  
Before Eugene can tell himself very sternly to not do this again, he looks up and to his right.  
  
“When you fell from heaven,” Jack says.  
  
Eugene wouldn’t ever be able to say why, but he humors him. “A little.”  
  
“See, I figured you’d have to have some angel bones in your body because you were so nice about--.” Jack stops and scrunches up his face a little, the expression funny on him in the dim light. “Oh. I thought you were going to say you weren’t an angel.”  
  
Eugene appreciates the fact that he at least still comes off as a sane, rational human being. “What happened with Father Yao?”  
  
“Father Yao has been given the very important task of teaching at Bible camp for the next three weeks.” Jack sighs, every bit as melodramatic as Eugene remembered him. “I don’t get along very well with children.”  
  
Eugene raises an eyebrow. “But you’re an angel.”  
  
“Not of _children_ ,” he says. “Not of these children, anyway. We get the right of first refusal.”  
  
Eugene is almost certain he hasn’t used that term correctly, but instead of mentioning it, he orders them another round of club soda. “So you thought you might stay with me for a while.”  
  
“No! Of course not. I just came to thank you, again,” Jack says. “For helping me find where I needed to go.”  
  
It’s ambiguously heavenly in a way that makes Eugene think this might be Jack, trying to tell him his _number_ is up. He leans back and stares for a moment, but if Jack knows something about his untimely death that he doesn’t, he isn’t revealing it on his face. And if Eugene knew anything about Jack (which he never expected to nor asked to), it was that he wasn’t very good at hiding anything.  
  
The fear passes. Jack’s no angel of death (which was another thing Eugene never expected to be so certain of).  
  
“Mr. Holden,” he says once he’s convinced himself he wouldn’t be stepping into a fatal accident anytime soon. “I do believe you just told a fib.”  
  
Jack goes a little pink around the ears. “Maybe a _little_ one.”  
  
“Simon’s gone to Argentina,” Eugene says. “After you wash his sheets, you can have his room until he gets deported.”  
  
Jack brightens, then blinks. “Really? You’d do that?”  
  
Eugene feels his offer warranted _much_ more surprise than that. He can’t put a name to reason when it comes to anything he does around Jack, if only because he still can’t fathom the existence of Jack in the first place. Maybe it’s a misplaced sense of curiosity telling him he could learn so much more about the phenomenon that is Jack Holden with him in close range for three weeks. Maybe it’s a misplaced sense of _duty_ telling him to keep the kid away from people who might see him as a phenomenon.  
  
Maybe he just comes off as the sort of guy that would be a better roommate than Simon Lauchlan.  
  
Whatever the reason, and whether a reason even exists, Eugene nods. “Yeah, of course. Unless there’s any problems with that arrangement?”  
  
Eugene doesn’t add _such as, are you only able to sleep on hallowed ground?_ even though kidding around with Jack seems like a natural thing to do. He does, however, file that one away for later use.  
  
“Not really,” Jack says. “Well, one thing.”  
  
Eugene leans in to listen very carefully when Jack waves him closer so he can whisper, “You haven’t told me your name.”  
  
Which is clearly some kind of angel humor because Eugene clearly remembers Jack calling him by name on more than one occasion, and even calling him _‘gene_ at one point. This is exactly what he says.  
  
“Well, of course I _know_ your name,” Jack says. His shoulders shift and Eugene can almost see his feathers ruffling under his coat. “I’m an angel, after all. You just haven’t told me. I’ve been here long enough now to know that it’s only polite--’gene? Eugene?”  
  
Eugene has paid his tab, gotten up, and started to walk away.  
  
“Wait! Hang on, I had one more question! Do you have HBO?”  
  
  
  
The Grigoris get better. Jack cashes in his vacation years and stays.


End file.
